1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for analyzing information aggregates. More particularly, it relates to evaluating information aggregates by visualizing usage patterns.
2. Background Art
Existing systems for knowledge management are focused primarily on individuals and the documents they create. Such systems typically organize documents along two primary dimensions:    1. A physical dimension that reflects a fundamental unit of storage in the underlying system. Examples of physical units of storage include a Notes database (NSF) or a QuickPlace.    2. A topical dimension that collects documents together based on their content or expected usage. Examples of the logical dimension include categories (to group documents that are concerned with a particular topic) or collections (to group documents that are serving a particular purpose).
The user interfaces in existing information systems are therefore concerned with displaying information along these two dimensions. Search interfaces, for example, often allow a search to be scoped based on both the physical and topical dimensions, and of course are focused on returning documents. This approach is useful, but it focuses on what documents are about and not what people do with those documents.
The Lotus Discovery Server (LDS) is a Knowledge Management (KM) tool that allows users to more rapidly locate the people and information they need to answer their questions. It categorizes information from many different sources (referred to generally as knowledge repositories) and provides a coherent entry point for a user seeking information. Moreover, as users interact with LDS and the knowledge repositories that it manages, LDS can learn what the users of the system consider important by observing how users interact with knowledge resources. Thus, it becomes easier for users to quickly locate relevant information.
There is a need, however, to determine which visualizations could be derived from what LDS learns from observing the users. In particular, there is a need to (1) identify trends in knowledge over time, (2) identify those visualizations that allow inferences about how successfully the system is adopted and utilized by users, and (3) identify those visualizations which could help or encourage a higher level of adoption.
The focus of LDS is to provide specific knowledge or answers to localized inquiries; focusing users on the documents, categories, and people who can answer their questions. There is a need, however, to magnify existing trends within the system—thus focusing on the system as a whole instead of specific knowledge.
There is a great deal of existing literature on the analysis of usage patterns on the Web. Web site tracking typically focuses on browsing activity (opens) only, and there is a need to extend this notion to a wider variety of metrics.
Collaborative filtering applications monitor usage patterns and suggest things that might be of interest based on the similarity of an individual's patterns of usage to the patterns of others. However, such systems do not visualize the usage data, and cannot help in generating insights on how a collection of people behave. Additionally, there is a need to generalizes the analysis to collections of documents, whereas collaborative filtering applications are typically concerned with individual documents.
The Lotus Discovery Server collects usage metrics of this sort, but does not create visualizations or reports of them, and does not support the generalized notion of an aggregate.
There is a need in the art to provide a system and method for analyzing the use of general aggregates, such as by the creation of usage graphs, analyzing change in usage over time, and analyzing access patterns in a collaborative environment.
It is an object of the invention to provide an improved system and method for evaluating usage patterns in aggregates.